A man with the right scruffed-up beard and breadth of chest swaggered into the S and M dungeon that was my place of business, and twenty minutes and one grand later had my chin — still soft with the downy fluff of teen-girl skin — held steady in one paw while the other one flew at my face so hard and fast that I ceased to exist as the same collection of matter I had been the previous instant.
When Sarah’s mother, Penny, got sick four years into our marriage, we decided to move back to Mississippi, considering it penance for the sins of our youth. We signed a lease on a house, a white one-story on the historical register with a wraparound porch and angels, stars, and the moon painted on the transom above the front door.
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The best works from The Sun’s second decade, featuring interviews with spiritual teacher Ram Dass, maverick psychologist James Hillman, potter and poet M.C. Richards, and others.
Table of ContentsX
A Note On The Cover
Introduction Sy Safransky
Progress Fiction by Gillian Kendall
On Seeing A Sex Surrogate Mark O’Brien
A Priest Calls On Sunday Night Poetry by Edwin Romond
The Heart Of Compassion: An Interview With Ram Dass Sy Safransky
Christmas In Seattle Fred Hill
Sonderkommando Fiction by Ivor S. Irwin
Even Hitler Poetry by David C. Childers
Judaism’s Mystical Heart: An Interview With Dovid Din Howard Jay Rubin
A Clouded Visit With Rolling Thunder Pat Ellis Taylor
The White Man’s Vision-Quest Journal Fiction by Gloria Dyc
The End Of A Sixties Dream? An Interview With Stephen Gaskin Michael Thurman
When Thieves Break In Stephen T. Butterfield
Notes Poetry by Chris Bursk
Aliens In The Garden Fiction by James Carlos Blake
Eating Head Lorenzo W. Milam
All The Panamas In The World And Herb’s Fiction by T.L. Toma
Blood For Oil Poetry by Chris Bursk
A Soccer Hooligan In America Fiction by Carl-Michal Krawczyk
Why Schools Don’t Educate John Taylor Gatto
Giving Away Gardens Dan Barker
Scavenger’s Run David Grant
Amazing Conversations John Rosenthal
Born Too Young: Diary Of A Pilgrimage Sparrow
The Myth Of Therapy: An Interview With James Hillman Sy Safransky
Miracle At Canyon De Chelly Deena Metzger
Somewhere Along The Line Poetry by Antler
Cowards Dan Howell
Villanelle Poetry by Richard Hoffman
Of Lineage And Love Stephen T. Butterfield
Flesh Of My Flesh Poetry by Ona Siporin
Heart Too Big Fiction by John C. Richards
Jealousy Poetry by Lou Lipsitz
Last Year’s Poverty Was Not Enough Fiction by Ashley Walker
My Mother Is Still Alive Poetry by Kathleen Lake
Uniting The Opposites: An Interview With M.C. Richards Sy Safransky
Night Of Dying Maureen Stanton
This Life, This Word Unsaid Poetry by John Hodgen
What’s Eating Me: A Memoir David Guy
Finding Out About Your Heart Fiction by Candace Perry
Letter To Maxim Alison Luterman
She Said, Can’t We Just Be Friends? Poetry by R.T. Smith
What It’s Like Dana Branscum
Trying To Quit Eleanor Glaze
On Being Unable To Breathe Stephen T. Butterfield
The Cure Poetry by Kathleen Lake
The Unhealed Life Yaël Bethiem
Combing Poetry by Veronica Patterson
Why I Like Dead People Sallie Tisdale
The Evidence Of Miracles Poetry by Jaimes Alsop
Instrument Of The Immortals Jake Gaskins
The Prayer Of The Body: An Interview With Stephen R. Schwartz Sy Safransky
The Body Knew Poetry by Tim Seibles
Tully Fiction by D. Patrick Miller
The Ward Bruce Mitchell
Contributors
Read an ExcerptX
Someone called me recently to ask my advice about starting a magazine. I told her the most important advice I could give her was not to follow anyone’s advice.
If I’d followed the advice I was given in 1974, I never would have started The Sun. You need a million dollars to start a magazine, people told me. That was exactly a million dollars more than I had. To print the first issue, I borrowed fifty dollars. I sold the magazine on the street. For more than ten years, there were fewer than a thousand subscribers and never enough money to pay the bills. Unfortunately, this was the plight of many small magazines in those years; few survived.
Last year, when The Sun celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary, our assistant editor joked that, in independent-journal years, this made The Sun about two hundred years old. I’m grateful The Sun has evolved from a stapled stack of xeroxed pages to a handsome monthly magazine, with nearly fifty thousand subscribers nationwide. I’m grateful, too — at a time when a handful of media conglomerates control most of what we read in books, newspapers, and magazines — that The Sun survives without corporate backing and without carrying any advertising. One of the few reader-supported magazines in the country, its very existence makes a statement.
The Sun’s literary reputation has grown as well. The magazine has received four Alternative Press Awards from the Utne Reader. Works from The Sun have won the Pushcart Prize, been featured on National Public Radio, and appeared in Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. But these accolades wouldn’t mean a thing if The Sun hadn’t stayed true to itself: a magazine that honors life in all its complicated glory; that avoids literary pretentiousness and spiritual posturing; that celebrates beauty without ignoring the destructive forces around (and within) us. Sometimes sorrowful, sometimes mischievous, The Sun is a magazine whose politics are personal and whose God isn’t way up in the sky. People who write for The Sun aren’t afraid to look at what they’ve lost; nor are they afraid to insist on joy, to look joy in the eye no matter how hard they’re crying. Their struggle, our struggle: where do we draw the line? The Sun reminds us there are no lines.
In the mideighties, we published A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky, a two-volume anthology of the best essays, stories, poems, and interviews from the magazine’s first ten years. Stubborn Light, the book you’re holding in your hands, is volume three in the “Best of The Sun” series, covering the magazine’s second decade.
Choosing what to include was a challenge. As I worked my way through the 120 issues we published from 1984 to 1993, my list of “definite” yeses grew longer and longer. I winced, knowing what lay ahead. Mind you, I’m accustomed to making tough decisions; we receive nearly a thousand submissions a month at The Sun. But this was different. These weren’t unsolicited manuscripts. This was writing I’d published, writing I’d fallen in love with. Now I’d fallen in love again.
In the end, as I struggled to pare down my choices, I felt like a hiker who’d been told to lighten his pack until it contained nothing that wasn’t absolutely essential — and then to get rid of half of that.
I consoled myself that no anthology, no matter how inclusive, could do justice to a decade of The Sun. Some of what it leaves out: All those heated exchanges on the Correspondence page. People in Readers Write revealing some secret shame or secret happiness. The amazing photographs. The page of quotations that seals each issue with a kiss. The best of The Sun? It’s the smart, dedicated people who work beside me, and it’s all the devoted men and women who have come and gone. It’s our old house in Chapel Hill with the creaky wooden floors and a ghost I’ve never seen. It’s a subscriber telling me he can’t imagine life without The Sun. As if I could.
Many people worked long and hard on Stubborn Light. Special thanks go to The Sun’s art director, Julie Burke, for carefully overseeing the project and giving the book its quiet, elegant look; assistant editor Andrew Snee for his incisive suggestions and sensitive editing; copy editor Seth Mirsky for guarding the gates of grammar and usage; proofreader Lynda Malone for standing beside him; manuscript editor Colleen Donfield for helping me decide what to leave in and what to take out, and whose comment sheets are themselves works of art; and editorial assistant Rachel Elliott for doggedly typing the text, and doggedly entering the corrections, and doggedly keeping the rest of us moving ahead.
None of my own essays are included in Stubborn Light, since many of them have already been reprinted in my book Four in the Morning. Nor did we include excerpts from the Readers Write section; we’re planning a best of Readers Write, to appear in the near future.
You can open Stubborn Light and begin reading anywhere. But we’ve arranged the book, as we do each issue of The Sun, to be read from front to back. If you read it this way, you may find that Stubborn Light is more than the sum of its parts.
Publication dates are noted at the end of each piece. When reading the interviews, it’s important to remember that people change; their ideas may not be the same as they were ten or fifteen years ago. Three people we interviewed — Rabbi Dovid Din, M.C. Richards, and Stephen R. Schwartz — have died. In 1997, Ram Dass suffered a debilitating stroke, which has limited his ability to speak.
It also grieves me to note the death of two authors whose work appears in Stubborn Light. In 1996, on a blustery winter night in Shrewsbury, Vermont, Stephen T. Butterfield’s heart gave out while he was walking his dog; he was fifty-three. Just the day before, Butterfield had spent hours playing guitar and bouzouki with his Celtic band, When the Wind Shakes the Barley. According to his friends, he had left the session filled with the joy of the music and the communal spirit that comes from making music together.
Mark O’Brien died in July 1999 at the age of forty-nine, in his apartment in Berkeley, California. Almost completely paralyzed by polio in childhood, O’Brien insisted on living on his own, with minimal assistance, most of his adult life. He wrote — with passion, humor, and breathtaking honesty — using a mouth-stick to press the keys of his computer. He died alone, in the middle of the night, in his iron lung.
If O’Brien isn’t dancing in heaven now to one of Butterfield’s lilting tunes, heaven’s the worse for it.
Sy Safransky